


forward, deep into a wood so darkly green

by mintpearlvoice



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Chronic Illness, Codependency, Eating Disorders, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, Sibling Bonding, clingy traumatized unsettling siblings, embryonic murder badasses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-09 13:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19888471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: Hansel was ill with scurvy after the witch's house, but he's better now- the town physician said so. Everything is supposed to be perfectly normal and perfectly fine.So why does Gretel feel so uneasy?Containing gleeful anachronisms, Gretel with an eating disorder, and Absolutely No Instinctively Used Witchcraft, Why Would You Even Suspect Such A Thing. Because I like writing slow-paced, introspective fics for fast-paced canons.May or may not contain explosions.





	1. what you eat devours you

"The house is   
gingerbread and sugar   
will fill you up at first.   
  
You will think you   
have found childhood.   
  
But she is inside   
what you eat   
devours you."

-Kathleen Jesme, "Afraid to Look Afraid to Look Away"

(source for chapter title)

For some reason, they couldn’t be harmed by magic. Any attempt would zing harmlessly aside.  
  
So: everything Gretel ate was poisoned. Sometimes half and sometimes just a third. It would taste nearly normal when she finished it- but two hours later she’d be curled on the floor, helpless, convulsing, knives of pain stabbing through her stomach. The witch would lecture her on how it was her fault for being greedy, on how if she’d eaten more carefully, she wouldn’t be sick.  
So she learned.  
She learned to chew every bite thirty times before swallowing it, so she could spit out anything poisoned. Sometimes the poisoned food tasted just a bit saltier or creamier. And she learned to leave half of her food on her plate, because she had a knack for telling which half was poisoned and which wasn’t- saving leftovers for Hansel, because the poison only worked on her. And then it was safest to not touch the bits around the edges of the safe bit, in case poison had leaked. And then her first hearty meal on escape had made her sick, too. Whether something was wrong with the food or with her didn’t feel like it mattered. She’d be sensible and stick by the rules, and no one would nag her to eat every bite the way the witch had. Gretel was sensible down to her bones.  
  
The witch only wanted Gretel’s heart. “That’s the most powerful part of a little girl,” she said, leaning in too close.  
Hansel, on the other hand... his organs and bones would all come in handy, but what she truly wanted was his fat. She would boil it down and make it into wax for candles and salves and sealing jars and little dolls. Everything he ate was safe, but all of it was candy and pastries, disgustingly rich. Around the time she grew thin enough to slip between the bars of her brother’s cage and comfort him, a few months into their captivity, Hansel had started getting sick. Sleeping all the time, complaining he was still tired when Gretel shook him awake. Strange violet-red dots on his legs and arms, dots she’d thought were flea bites until she’d realized they were bruises.  
A scar he had from falling out of a tree years ago reopened and bled; not a great deal, but nothing could make the blood stop. She could protect him from being eaten. She’d found a bone from a previous child, gave it to Hansel to hold through the bars when the witch wanted to squeeze a finger to check how plump he’d gotten. That would keep him safe. At least for now. The witch’s hearing was uncanny, her sense of smell terrifying, but her bloodshot eyes didn’t focus so well during the day.

She couldn’t keep him safe from whatever this malady was.   
“Hansel, stay awake and listen,” she said, hiding her fear with a stern tone as she knelt before him, weighing the helpfulness of slapping his face. We have to make a plan, we have to think-  
He shook his head. “Please, Gretel, I’m so tired. I just want to fall asleep and never wake up.”  
The horror of what he’d just uttered hit both twins at the same moment.  
“Not like that,” Hansel stuttered, as the same time as Gretel snapped back, “Don’t you dare.”  
There were flies amongst the remains of half-eaten pastries and partially sucked lollipops that surrounded Hansel. One buzzed too close, and Gretel swatted it. She wouldn’t let them buzz around the remains of her brother as well. Wouldn’t let him die, for one thing.  
“I’ll try my best,” he joked weakly, but his eyes still looked red and glassy, with no truth in his smile. He shivered. Gretel wanted to give him a hug, but even the lightest touch made him bruise nowadays.  
That was when she knew. They would need to kill the witch, not just escape her clutches- because she couldn’t be allowed to live after what she had done.

The next day, Hansel dropped the bone. The old witch heard it clatter to the floor.

She dragged the two chests of stolen wealth that had been under the witch’s bed out of the house, dragged out any clothes that looked warm enough for late September, and all the food that wasn’t candy or poison. Hansel lay against a tree, eyes half-closed as he watched the cottage’s embers smoulder. The same spell that kept rain off the thatch roof meant the house had gone up like a torch, even though all around it dripped with rain.

He’d brought out a jar of the salty brown paste the witch used to poison Gretel. Even that small effort had exhausted him.

Hours of half-cajoling, half-shouting at Hansel to stay on his feet brought them to the next town. Two children in cast-off rags dripping with diamonds and gold. A bag with three hundred and twenty-seven golden coins. But when Gretel managed to spit out what she’d done in front of all the village elders peering suspiciously down at her, they didn’t have to spend a single coin for food, shelter, and rousing the town physician and his wife in the middle of the night.

(No one, not even the physician’s wife, could identify the poison the witch had used. They all agreed, though, that it tasted delicious.)

The physician leaned over Hansel’s bed, examining the strange marks on his arms and legs.

“Is my brother going to die?” Gretel asked quietly, shifting from foot to foot in her new shoes with no holes. They felt strange.

She had been born five minutes before Hansel, and made up her mind long ago that those were the only minutes she ever intended to spend without him.

The physician straightened up, shaking his head. “He has a disease called scurvy. It comes from not eating enough fruits and vegetables. Sailors at sea usually contract it- it’s rare on land.”

“Like a pirate,” Hansel mumbled, clearly delighted.

So: he’d been given sauerkraut and dandelion greens and rutabaga juice. She ate the dandelion greens in solidarity, having picked them herself. She woke the next morning in a trundle bed in the town physician’s attic, feeling strangely calm, as if she’d just had some delightful and forgotten dream.

(Maybe Hansel was doing better?)

And by the end of the day the spots of bruising had faded, and by the end of the next he was chasing her around the garden with a toad while she shouted at him, the town physician’s wife kindly but rather ineffectively cautioning them both to mind the beets.

The physician wanted to diagnose her with nervous consumption, but she could eat up to three-quarters of a plate if she had prepared it. That turned his piercing gaze away.

She had felt it when her brother was sick. Like a tickle on her shoulderblades or goosebumps on her arms. The same way she could tell food was poisoned without even tasting it, sometimes. People had always said twins were just like that. (Gretel had never met another set of twins.)

Now, they had escaped from the witch’s cottage two years ago. Every so often they poked around the decaying ruin to bury her bones farther apart in deeper holes, to make sure she stayed dead. They lived with the physician and his wife.

Hansel helped with most of the farm chores the physician was too exhausted from being shaken awake at midnight to attend to. Gretel weeded the garden and helped prepare medicines. She knew that they’d mostly been adopted for their usefulness; Hansel thought their adoptive parents genuinely loved them. He could keep his illusions. They had little else.

This morning she’d woken before the rooster’s crow or a call of “There’s chores to be done.” Woken to a feeling like someone was standing right behind her, breathing on her neck, when she sat up in bed. Darning a sock, she kept shaking her hands. It felt like cold fingers were trying to snatch at hers.

She looked at Hansel out in the sunlit field, chopping felled-pine wood. As she watched, he put down the axe, took up a bucket of water, and drank a long drink. He’d finally lost the weight the witch had forced onto him, even though he’d been eating like a horse lately- growing boys did that, apparently. Well, good for him. Before taking up his axe, he saw her staring and waved. He pulled one silly face after another, crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out, shoving a finger up his nose- until she finally rolled her own eyes and waved back before returning to her mending.

Again the feeling that wasn’t quite someone touching her shoulder, that wasn’t quite cold fingers. Nothing uncanny, _unheimlich_ , not the hand of a ghost- and no reason for her to feel this way.

None she could find.


	2. only to learn relinquished, forsworn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title & chapter quote from http://www.versedaily.org/gretel.shtml

Gretel leaves half her food on her plate; Hansel finishes her leftovers and licks his plate clean. It’s just one more way in which they are really just one person, in every way it counts.

She sits outside the next afternoon, sipping water to stave off hunger; before she can ask Hansel to refill her cup, he’s already on his way to the pump with both of their containers.

They fall asleep in their creaky, drafty attic room, summer wind whistling through the trees. Beckoning a thunderstorm. Beckoning something she didn’t want to meet. She’s learned how to fall asleep to the sounds of the old house settling, branches brushing the shingled roof.

“Gretel!” A harsh, panicked whisper in the night tugs her instantly awake.

She sits upright, fumbling for a weapon before remembering that this isn’t the orphanage- they’re not allowed to have knives in their room.

The lantern Hansel holds reflects off the shine of his sweaty face, brightening his fearful eyes. “Gretel, she’s coming after us.”

“Who?” She glances suspiciously at the trapdoor, at the window.

“The witch,” Hansel whispers, lantern swaying in unsteady hand.

At once she clambers over to his bed. The springs creak as she puts an arm around his shoulders. “She’s not. That was a nightmare. We killed her.” Maybe they are safe for now. In this house, in this town, in this circle of light.

He licks dry lips. “Are you sure she’s really gone? What if she’s just biding her time? Waiting for us to let down our guard. She’ll come back for us- what if I’m not strong enough to protect you...”

If his hand shakes any more, he’ll drop the lantern; she takes it, her own grip firm. “I’ll protect you, if I have to. I’m nearly as good with a crossbow. I’ll put two silver arrows right through her eyes and cut off her head while she’s blinded. A witch wouldn’t come this far into town anyway. We’re safe, I promise.” She says that as much to convince him as to convince herself. These inexplicable fears, this sense of wrongness, just won’t leave.

“Safe,” he echoes, blinking at her as if he hasn’t quite heard her. “If… if you say so.” But he still puts his head down on the pillow and closes his eyes.

Hansel is still in bed when Gretel wakes up. Sleepyhead, slugabed; is he going to leave her to do all his chores? “It’s not fair,” she mutters. So she washes her face with water from the pitcher, then brushes and re-braids her hair before bothering to drag him out of bed.

“Hansel,” she says sharply, standing over him.

No response. Honestly, sometimes he’s the most annoying person. She shakes him by the shoulder. “Hansel, wake up!”

Not even a twitch- not even when she hits him, hard.

Gretel hears her own scream. It’s tinny and distant in her ears, as if all the terror and helplessness belong to some other girl. As if that’s someone else’s brother lying there.

***

The town physician and his wife ask Gretel a million questions, and none of them make sense. Answer after answer is “No.” “Of course not.” “Well, how would I know?”

And meanwhile her brother is lying perfectly still, spread across the kitchen table. His breath smells like rotten candy apples. It comes shallow and slow. He looks like he’s sleeping. But when he’s asleep, a light touch can call him back. Now he’s gone miles and miles away, and she can’t follow his path.

No, he hasn’t been coughing or sneezing. No, he hasn’t been sick to his stomach- didn’t he eat everything that was put in front of him at dinner last night?

“Has he been going to the privy and outhouse any more than usual?” the town physician offers.

Finally. A question that doesn’t make her feel like she’s treading swamp water with rocks in her pockets. Still, she wishes it made a little more sense. “Of course he’s been going to the outhouse more than usual, he’s been drinking buckets and buckets of water. I’d’ve been more worried if he didn’t rush off.”

They leave her with Hansel, who looks pale against the table’s time-polished dark wood. She takes his waxen hand in both of his, feeling his pulse jump, impossibly fast.

If you die I will kill you and bundle everything that’s left into the baker’s oven, she thinks. No witch can steal your corpse if I eat you myself.

His heartbeat speeds up. She has a hard time keeping her own from pounding in rhythm, like a woodpecker pummeling into a tree.

And then- maybe her grip’s shifted, maybe it’s the swirling panic confusing her thoughts, but there’s a moment when she doesn’t feel anything. No heartbeat at all. This isn’t happening, and she squeezes his hand tighter, you will go nowhere I can’t follow and if you leave me I will pull you back. She feels furious enough to scowl his heart into beating. Like she could burn the cottage with a look.

This isn’t happening, because her brother cannot die because she refuses to let him, and she splays her fingers out over his heart, still clutching his hand with one of hers as if he can squeeze back. There’s a pulse there. Or at least- there’s got to be one-

_By everything that burns in me, that howls in me like the wind, everything sturdy and deep as an oak tree’s roots, you are not allowed to die. You will not leave._

Later, Gretel will understand that she imagined the light. Panic made her exaggerate. See things, even.

It’s the sun in her eyes from the scratched glass in an unglazed window. Light off the dented copper pan hanging over the hearth. A quickening, a stirring, a burst of blue-white sparks that sting her eyes-

She squeezes her eyes shut, but the image is still burned in her mind; her hand stretched over Hansel’s chest, glowing bonfire-bright.

When she remembers how to breathe again, everything is clearly fine. There are still bundles of plants hanging from the ceiling to dry. There’s the blown glass globe that’s supposed to keep witches away. The sink with dishes that need scrubbing. The floor she’ll sweep sometime today.

And Hansel, his chest rising and falling evenly, though he still does not wake. She’s been sitting here, holding his hand, waiting for the physician and his wife to return. Worried but patient. Doing nothing that a perfectly ordinary girl would not be capable of; she is, after all, a perfectly ordinary girl in every way. Well, with a few more swear words in her vocabulary and some uncommon skill with gun and bow.

Nothing strange at all happened. A trick of the light. She forgets to be afraid of herself. (She always does.)

The town physician and his wife- and the local alchemist- charge into the cottage. “Any change in his condition?” someone asks.

“No,” Gretel says firmly, because nothing happened. A trick of the light, her panic, her exhaustion, and nothing more.

The alchemist: “I’ve brought an injection, you’ll need to pull up his shirt so it can go into his stomach.” The syringe in his hand looks wickedly sharp and glints in the light. Like a witch’s clawed fingernails, a witch’s eyes. But what he says next sounds plausible enough that Gretel trusts him at once. “He has the sugar sickness. His body isn’t digesting properly, so it’s eating itself.”

She’d thought Hansel had gotten better. That she was the only one still hurting, still afraid. All the time, he was dying right under her nose. She should have left that oven down at two hundred degrees. Slow-roasted the bitch like a partridge.

Gretel rolls up her brother’s shirt and watches as the injection plunges in just below his ribs. She needs to learn how to do this as soon as she can.


	3. what awaits her, ravenous, magical

If poison took her out, she wouldn’t be able to protect her brother, to remind him to keep his watch wound and needles clean. When their foster parents are preparing dinner, she slips out and puts on her gardening gloves.  
In all the homes and orphanages, someone always brings up Gretel’s knack for gardening. Allegedly vegetables grow tastier under her touch. it’s true that she can keep deer away from a garden, but all you have to do is ring it with mint, because deer hate the smell.  
They’re supposed to eat regular meals, but neither adoptive parent will complain about her being in the garden.  
She pulls out weeds to the controlled rhythm of her circling thoughts. Her stomach is empty. Her stomach is flat. That means she’s safe.   
The back door creaks open. Her muscles tighten- but it’s only Hansel. She breathes out.  
  
“Not hungry?” He says it a little too casually, like he knows she is.  
“I need a clear head.” It’s not defensive. It’s not not defensive, though.  
The trees are rustling: copper beeches, some distant barn owl, a luminous late-summer gibbous-moon night when the mugwort grows tall.  
Leaves rustle as he makes his way through the garden and sits down next to her. “Maybe eating a little something could help with that, though?”  
He holds out an early apple. Whole, not cut, only one small dent on red-streaked skin. “It’s safe. I picked it myself today and it hasn’t been out of my sight since it came off the tree.”  
Apples- most whole hard fruit- are hard to poison. You need to distill the oil from the paste, and then inject it into the apple. And there’s always a telltale hole left behind. She inspects the apple. Skin’s unbroken, just like Hansel said. There’s no reason she can’t eat all of it. It should be safe.  
Her body doesn’t know that, though. She gags as soon as the apple’s in her hands, before even biting it. Ends up on her hands and knees in the fresh dark earth, her body fighting to purge what it’s sure is poison from her fear.   
“Easy, I’m here, you’re okay, you’re okay,” Hansel says, guiding her into his lap. He strokes her shoulderblades until she remembers she knows how to breathe. “I’ve got you. You’re safe, I promise.”  
(She came so close to not having him.)  
At last the retching and then the sobs have eased.  
“Do you want to try again?”  
She shudders. “No.” Some days her body just won’t accept food, even when she’s shaking with the need to eat. She manages to muddle through with juice and broth. Liquids contaminated with her poison can’t stay clear.

“What if I fed you?”

Her brother is the one person she trusts to not poison her. More than that- the one person who could protect her from being poisoned. Closing her eyes, she focuses on the sweet bites lifted to her mouth, the soft wet sound of his knife darting into the apple when he slices each piece.

It’s good to sit like this. To eat like this, just the two of them; they are a family in and of themselves.   
  
She likes wrapping his wool scarf around her neck when she goes out on a frosty morning to feed the goats, a layer of his scent between breath and cold air. Shrugging on his worn leather jacket if she needs to help their foster parents with a sick or injured neighbor in the middle of the night, and knowing he hasn’t yet grown into the garment either as she rolls up the sleeves.  
Bringing down a rabbit with his crossbow, and knowing all the places his fingers have touched.  
(Summer means no excuse to wear his clothes. One more way he was able to hide this sickness from her.)  
Most of all, though, she likes sitting like this. Leaning back against him, knowing that if she needs to, if she turns her head a little, she can hear his heartbeat, breathe him in.  
Usually she’s always a bit cold, even on a night like this one, but Hansel runs gloriously, deeply warm. Now, she’s not cold at all.

“We’re going to be all right,” Hansel whispers fiercely, as she chews on the apple core. “We can manage, we’ll beat this.”

She doesn’t want to ask him what ‘this’ is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from the poem "nocturne with witch, oven, and two little figures" by peter cooley

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so:  
> I fell into a research rabbit hole on this and I'm dragging you all down with me. 
> 
> According to science, you'd get scurvy before diabetes if eating only candy. https://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-to-your-body-if-you-only-ate-candy-co-1788343256 and that's Type 2 diabetes, which... Hansel doesn't have, because TYPE TWO DIABETICS CAN OFTEN MANAGE THEIR DIABETES BY WATCHING WHAT THEY EAT. I am gamely wallpapering over this with some kind of logic. 
> 
> All my information about scurvy comes from:  
> https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40505
> 
> Eating disorders actually existed in the 17 and 18th century, and they were actually called nervous consumption:   
> https://www.kartiniclinic.com/blog/post/anorexia-nervosa-in-the-17th-century/
> 
> I wanted to make the twins a matched pair of anachronisms, so I gave Gretel a peanut allergy/intolerance. Pretty sure only Spain and France would have peanuts back then- peanuts didn't even reach North America until the late 1800s. 
> 
> Title is from the poem "Gretel, from a Sudden Clearing" by Marie Howe.   
> https://allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/post/183897692963/gretel-from-a-sudden-clearing-marie-howe


End file.
